By Bill Neil
I
suppose another way to look at this is that the prints have come back from the crime lab,
and ours are collectively all over the extinguished species. The best we can plead, I think, is
“involuntary species slaughter.”
Dear Matt:
An environmental friend of mine passed
on your letter from the “Gowood Blogspot,” and your worries that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has gone overboard
in protecting “nature,” and slighted humans as a consequence.
I think it is a good thing we greens to
have face tough questions about what we value, and the efficacy of the laws on
the books, good to listen to those who have a very different perspective and
probing questions about the ancient conflicts, between the human economy and
nature’s ecology. However, neither the
economy nor nature’s ecology is static, and the equations between the two may
not look the same today as they did just after the Ice Ages, in 1776, or 1996.
Indeed, the two are more fatally intertwined than we ever imagined. That’s something I want to explore with you. I think that your statement in the first
paragraph that “very few of the species we currently have are ones that were
here 10-20 thousand years ago” is not correct.
I suspect that 95-99% of them are still with us, and the ones that have
gone extinct first are the ones our ancestors hunted to that fate, and I think
that even if you changed “thousands to millions” that would still be the case. But I defer to other experts to confirm what
survived from that epoch. And the
situation is changing rapidly now, over the past quarter of century, especially
with the rise of Asia to middle class American aspirations, and Brazil too, and
the intensification of globalization and global warming. Something new and ominous is afoot as we will
soon see, something called “The Sixth Extinction.”
